Poe Studies

"From that chamber, and from that mansion, I fled aghast." "The Fall of the House of Usher"

At the end of the second episode of the HBO series Lovecraft Country (2020), the protagonist flees a burning, collapsing house and is led to safety by his enslaved ancestor's ghost. Later in the series, another character will take possession of, and subsequently exorcise, a house used for torturous medical experimentation on Black bodies, whose basement contains a subterranean portal. These cinematic forays into the Black fantastic through [End Page 102] revision of the Lovecraft universe are also indebted to the Afrofuturistic world building of writers like Octavia Butler and Tananarive Due, whose writing reveals the sci-fi minefields in American literary landscapes. But who were their antecedents? This essay focuses on Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills (1986), a parable that satirizes Black bourgeois desire and uplift strategies modeled after Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839) and Dante Alighieri's Inferno. When we read Naylor's novel as an intertextual response to Poe's sinister aesthetic and gothicism, we can see how her writing anticipates innovations in late twentieth-century Black women's speculative fiction and horror. Naylor explores the corrosive side effects of Black capitalism and assimilation, while simultaneously illustrating the conflicting desires and patriarchal aspirations embedded within Black nationalist rhetoric. Poe's gothic interiors and narrative perspective provide a template for how Naylor's chapters work as cautionary tales about the obsessive and accumulative qualities of American individualism. Reading Naylor's depiction of the Nedeed home that is at the center of the Dantesque planned community of Linden Hills through "The Fall of the House of Usher" also illuminates the influence of earlier works, such as Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins's Of One Blood (1902) and Ann Petry's tales of ghostly New England landscapes, in shaping the African American gothic tradition. Finally, I examine how the continued revivification of Poe's falling house trope and gothic themes of intergenerational trauma and mental illness animate the Black and Indigenous reckonings of Tananarive Due's The Good House (2004).

Selective readings of Linden Hills and The Good House illustrate how the African American gothic tradition unravels the thematic threads in Poe's script, dramatizing America's guilty conscience regarding its willingness to commit atrocities in the name of progress or to maximize profit. In "Usher," Madeline Usher—the undead woman who rises from the bowels of the Usher estate—upends the fantasies being spun by the narrator and her brother. "Usher" also instantiates the notion that there is a subterranean secret buried within the foundation of the home—the apex of middle-class achievement—that serves as a source of power. The engine of Linden Hills, the secret that Luther Nedeed keeps buried in the basement, is also tied to capitalist conceptions of patriarchy and property ownership that view human beings as chattel. The founding Nedeed purchased his wife and, following the legal doctrine, partus sequitur ventrem, thereby owns her and any offspring. The first Mrs. Nedeed (née Luwana Packerville) records in her family Bible: "I thought in the name of decency my husband would have destroyed the evidence of my cursed bondage. […] O Blessed Saviour can it be that I have only exchanged one master for another?"¹ Naylor's text makes explicit the connections between capitalist [End Page 103] exploitation and patriarchy that undergird the American gothic tradition initiated by Poe's writing.

The inaugural season of American Horror Story (2011), a popular television series that explores folklore and myths that undergird our nation—the surrealist flipside of the American dream—is set in a haunted gothic mansion in Los Angeles. The haunted house trope is simple; owners attain a "good deal" on a property because of sinister events that have previously occurred, as in the 1979 classic The Amityville Horror. Unable to resist the bounty of capitalist speculation, the settling family disregards the history of the land. Rapid suburban sprawl in the United States in the 1980s produced films like Poltergeist, which reprised the trope of the haunted house, demonstrating that the failure to acknowledge misdeeds visited upon the Indigenous can have dire consequences. For instance, the hauntings in Poltergeist result from building tract homes over a Native burial ground. Land acknowledgements have now become commonplace, especially on college campuses. They are affirmations that make visible that the land upon which we stand is unceded and was often obtained by nefarious means. More often such statements function less as a balm for the dispossessed, who are rarely present to hear them, than as an exercise in appeasement of settler-guilt.²

Scholars like Avery Gordon, Eve Tuck, and C. Ree have explored how the sins of the past continue to manifest in the present as hauntings. In fact, a chillingly prescient idea that Tuck and Ree advance in "A Glossary of Haunting" is that from the perspective of the ghost "the haunting is the resolving, it is not what needs to be resolved."³ The suggestion echoes the sentiment pondered by essayist Jessie McCarthy in his poignantly titled collection, Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul?⁴ In other words, no amount of money can assuage the outrage of genocide and slavery. Or, as Jamaica Kincaid writes in A Small Place, the only fix is for the event to have never happened in the first place. Hence, the speculative turn becomes a way for Black writers to imagine a reparative method for mitigating past wrongs, while simultaneously acknowledging that such attempts may also be imperfect and incomplete.⁵

Turn-of-the-twentieth-century African American authors quickly took up the gothic–most notably, in Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood, which includes the raising from the dead of Dianthe Lusk by the medical student Reuel Briggs and a séance in which the ghost of an enslaved person returns to predict the death of her summoners in the coming Civil War. Hopkins was well-known for her generic experimentation and borrowing, and while Poe is not one of her explicit sources in this serial novel, the recurrence of slaveholders' transgressions in the form of supernatural occurrences is certainly present. In "Buried Alive: Gothic Homelessness, Black Women's Sexuality and (Living) Death in [End Page 104] Ann Petry's The Street," Evie Shockley offers a prescient analysis of Black writers' adoption of the gothic that can easily be applied to Naylor. She notes that Petry's novel teems with gothic conventions such as "live burial" and "doppelgängers"—elements that undergird her critique of domestic ideology. Charles Chesnutt also features doppelgängers in his novel The Marrow of Tradition to foreshadow and cover up a murder as well as hidden African descent. While Shockley pinpoints novels like Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone or Bram Stoker's Dracula as touchstones, Poe's oeuvre is also a likely referent. In calling "our attention to the widespread appearance of gothic language within the African American tradition to which she equally belongs," Petry serves as an important precursor to Naylor.⁶

Naylor fits perfectly into the African American gothic genealogy; she pushes the boundaries of the allegorical and horrific to interrogate capitalism alongside heteropatriarchal marriage and domestic imprisonment. The idea that patriarchal structures are punishing and destructive to both men and women is a powerful takeaway given that Naylor's work is firmly positioned in the Black feminist/womanist fiction writing cohort that includes Alice Walker and Toni Morrison. Naylor's other novels also contain a touch of the speculative and supernatural evident in both Mama Day and Bailey's Café, while her most celebrated work, The Women of Brewster Place, illustrates and animates the multifaceted architecture of oppression through linked stories of a neighborhood.

Naylor's Linden Hills has been read most often as a rewriting of Dante Alighieri's Inferno. Dantean readings fixate on the architecture of Linden Hills, reflected in a series of inverted Crescent drives descending to Tupelo and the clapboard house of the founder. When situated at the bottom, "you have a view all the way up" (258). To briefly summarize the plot: five days before Christmas, to make some money, and also to satisfy their curiosity, teenagers Lester and Willie descend into Linden Hills, taking odd jobs that allow them access into the fabled domiciles' interiors. Willie, the dreamer of the pair, seems most analogous to Dante's poet, yet instead of searching for his Beatrice, Willie is summoned by Willa, the most recent Mrs. Nedeed, who has been entombed with her dying son by her husband, descendent of the founder and current CEO of the Tupelo Realty Corporation. Easter eggs within the text like "It would take an epic to deal with something like What has this whole week meant?" (275) also point to the Inferno as an intertext. Because others have thoroughly explored the novel's allegorical relation to Dante, I pivot to what reading Naylor with Poe's gothic narrative as the substructure yields: insight into how Black bourgeois accumulation is corrosive aspiration, because its foundation relies upon heteropatriarchy and follows a settler colonial script that betrays and bewilders the residents.⁷ [End Page 105]

The origin story of Linden Hills, at first, seems to have much in common with Toni Morrison's portrait of the Bottom in Sula, a hilly, "backbreaking" plot in the hills, where a Black population settles after a former slave was compensated with land from the "bottom of heaven."⁸ Like "the Bottom," the land that Luther Nedeed develops into Linden Hills is neither fertile nor lush but an impossible-to-cultivate hilly plateau "hemmed in by the town cemetery" (2). Through a perverse alchemy of dogged determination and sacrifice, a planned community of newly emancipated residents flourishes. The founder, Luther Nedeed, whose name concurrently evokes property, contracts, and fallen angels, is a compact amalgam of spite and venom, following an occult template of his own making. His success brings him little peace because of generational rot at the foundation of Tupelo Drive, the first street in "a series of eight curved roads that ring themselves around the hill" in a geographic mirror of the circles of Dante's hell. Following Poe's gothic narrative arc, the house's collapse is an inevitable outcome.

Turning to Poe, the initial description of the "mansion of gloom" that is the house of Usher sets an ominous tone that only builds over the course of the narrative. The narrator writes:

[W]ith the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me—upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain—upon the bleak walls—upon the vacant eye-like windows—upon a few rank sedges—and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees—with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveler upon opium—the bitter lapse into every-day life—the hideous dropping off of the veil.

(Works 2:397)

From the beginning, the narrator personifies the dreadful house by portraying it as a site of desolation and loneliness. Throughout, he repeatedly refers to the "eye-like windows," which connote consciousness as well as surveillance from the inside out and the outside in. The other feature of note is "a black and lurid tarn" (Works 2:398), a reflective moat that doubles the house, and into which the structure ultimately sinks. He glimpses a "barely perceptible fissure, which, extending from the roof of the building in front, made its way down the wall in [End Page 106] a zigzag direction, until it became lost in the sullen waters of the tarn" (Works 2:400). Critics have noted this famous opening portrait of the house bears some resemblance to passages from popular British writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton's 1828 novel Pelham, which also features a "sullen pool" and "dreary heath."⁹ Others have observed that although Poe's works manifest aspects of Southern gothicism, none are situated in the South, but rather take place in "anonymous dreamscapes." Nevertheless, "Usher" is full of "all the elements that would later come to characterize the Southern Gothic," including incest, legacies of guilt, and "a great house and family falling into decay and ruin."¹⁰ These descriptive atmospheric elements give the house a sentience echoed in the representations of haunted houses in any number of media in the following centuries.

Houses collapse when their foundations either degenerate or are unsound from the beginning. This is the message the narrator perceives the moment he crosses the tarn. The "fissure" represents the contradiction at the heart of the United States, the issue that President Abraham Lincoln would, some twenty years after Poe's story, codify as the house divided against itself. The fall of Usher presages the disintegration of the Union into civil war as an incestuous dispute. American gothic literature is littered with collapsing houses, including "Sutpen's Hundred," from William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! (1936), which combusts with Clytie, Sutpen's mixed-race daughter, whom the text portrays as a human remnant of past misdeeds, shrouded inside. Absalom, Absalom! suggests that the flaw in Thomas Sutpen's design, which leads to the ultimate fall of his grand estate and the dynasty he planned to procreate, was his marriage to a woman of alleged African descent in Haiti. As in Poe's story, the "house" stands in for a patriarchal dynasty, as well as a building.

Antebellum legacies also surface in Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood to emphasize the corrupt nature and horrific practices of the plantation system in her novel of new psychology and diasporic adventure. On Christmas Eve, as in Linden Hills, Vance Hall becomes the setting for a ghost story that belies its festive décor. Though the drawing room was "well-calculated to remove all gloomy, pessimistic reasoning," a mesmeric ghost story in which Mira prophesizes the coming Civil War leaves the guests shaken. This tale, which contains clues to the two-pronged family legacy of incest and African royalty, does little to dispel the dismal events that occur inside Vance Hall and its adjacent landscape: the murder of Molly Vance by drowning and the subsequent murder of the recently revived Dianthe, who, like the unfortunate Madeline in "Usher," succumbs to a second death, this time by poison.

Hopkins's eclectic borrowings recall Poe's narrative architecture as well, by encapsulating Mira's prophecy as a story within a story: [End Page 107]

All the women will be widows and the men shall sleep in early graves. They come from the north, from the east, from the west, they sweep to the gulf through a trail of blood. Your houses shall burn, your fields be laid waste, and a downtrodden race shall rule in your land.¹¹

This prophetic narrative underscores the haunting nature of slavery and imperialism, not simply as outrages upon the land, evoked by the "trail of blood" that recalls the Trail of Tears, a common epithet for the forced migration of the Cherokee from their ancestral lands in Georgia to the Midwest, but also as something passed down in the body, like the birthmarks borne by Dianthe, Aubrey, and Reuel, marking them as brothers and sister. Spirit possession, visitations, and the "Black resonance" of her singing voice also reveal Dianthe's African ancestry.¹²

Amalgamation and incest are classic Southern gothic tropes; along similar lines, Madeline's live burial may be an attempt by Roderick to suppress their potentially incestuous relationship. There are no actual slaves present in "Usher," but actual Black characters do not need to be materially present. As Morrison's theorization of the Africanist presence in Poe demonstrates, these figures take the form of what Ralph Ellison termed shadow and act.¹³ Interestingly enough, unlike Sutpen's Hundred, 999 Tupelo Drive, or the baronial estate Ardham Lodge in Lovecraft Country, 124 Bluestone Road remains standing at the end of Beloved. Sethe and Baby Suggs tolerate the haunting by a "baby's fury" as part of slavery's legacy. That's because what was haunting that house was the external shame of the community that allowed "whitefolks with the Look" (slavecatchers) to come into Sethe's house, and her need to "make up for the handsaw," i.e., her infanticide. Only after the community atones by banding together to create "the sound that broke the back of words" and exorcise the spirit that had taken residence does peace descend upon Bluestone.¹⁴

Themes of intergenerational trauma and the perils of assimilation pervade the African American gothic. Linden Hills is a dark fable of Black capitalist accumulation—one of several works that use elements of the Southern gothic to tell a story that speaks to the particular position of the Black "settler."¹⁵ What does it mean to feel at home, to occupy stolen land, in a stolen body? Black settlers experience a double haunting. Especially because, as Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s popular genealogical show Finding Your Roots has demonstrated, most African Americans' family trees include the formerly enslaved as well as slaveholders. The acquisition of property by humans who were once considered property results in a double jeopardy that African American gothic writers have found to be a generative avenue to explore. The folk wisdom of Mamie Wilson, a resident who refuses to sell or move from her adjacent property or conform to [End Page 108] Nedeed's standards, offers persistent reminders not to compromise one's soul, which she analogizes as a "silver mirror." Wilson, Willie's great-grandmother, warns residents of the dangers of selling out as they ascend the ladders of success, whether financial or educational, or in matters of the heart. Popularized during the eighties, the term "sellout" represents betrayal of community/self. In one story, a gay man chooses a heterosexual marriage of convenience over a great love to secure a house on Tupelo Drive. But the most poignant tales unravel the threaded collective history of the Nedeed wives, the first of whom was her husband's enslaved property, upon which a real estate dynasty was founded. There is a strong connection between Willie, the Dantesque hero, and Willa, the last Mrs. Nedeed. As with the narrator vis-à-vis Madeline in the House of Usher, Willie can sense Willa's despair even from his friend's bedroom on the highest reaches of the boundaries of Linden Hills. The first time he hears the cry, it chills him because "an ancient instinct told them it wasn't an animal sending out that cry into the world" (60). Even when the cry goes unheard or ignored, its consistent presence is still felt

as it rattled against the closed window and then returned back over the treetops and house below. Back through the brick pillars on Tupelo Drive and along its shrubbed meridian. Back across the frozen lake in front of the white clapboard house. Then down through a basement air vent. Down to die in the aching throat of a woman who was crouching over the shrunken body of her son.

(61)

This wail will echo throughout Willie and Lester's descent through the nine circles to Tupelo drive, where, on Christmas Eve, Willie will inadvertently unlock the basement door.

In "Usher," the oral recitation of a romance similarly smothers the suffering sounds of Roderick's sister, the buried-alive Madeline. The narrator acutely grasps Madeline's struggles while reading to pacify Roderick: "No sooner had these syllables passed my lips, than—as if a shield of brass had indeed, at the moment, fallen heavily upon a floor of silver—I became aware of a distinct, hollow, metallic, and clangorous, yet apparently muffled reverberation" (Works 2:415). The utterances of the text both echo and obfuscate her attempts to free herself. Eventually, she does emerge:

but then without those doors there did stand the lofty and enshrouded figure of the lady Madeline of Usher. There was blood upon her white robes, and the evidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion of her emaciated frame. For a moment she remained trembling and [End Page 109] reeling to and fro upon the threshold—then, with low moaning cry, fell heavily inward upon the person of her brother, and in her violent and now final death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse, and victim to the terrors he had anticipated.

(Works 2:416–17)

As the narrator relates, brother and sister expire in a deadly embrace, a fate predestined by unnamed faults in the family line and precipitated by the physical and mental frailty of the siblings. In Linden Hills, Mrs. Nedeed's imprisonment by her husband turns her into a revenant, an undead representative of the collective Mrs. Nedeeds, whose individuality and maternal rights are steadily erased until they become shells of their former selves. One wife is devastated to discover her deed of ownership remains intact, even as her husband takes the legal steps to ensure that their son does not follow the condition of his mother. Another wife's face is gradually blurred and literally overshadowed in photographs until she disappears. These women do not go quietly. They fight back through domestic means, using their knowledge of herbal lore, and ultimately creating an archive in the pages of Bibles and cookbooks that provides the final Mrs. Nedeed with the courage to walk back up the stairs.

Willie and Willa's connection is apparent from early in the text when he appears to be the only one to perceive her pain. The similarity of their names connotes how Willie/Willa work as gothic doubles or doppelgängers. After Willie inadvertently unbolts the lock, "A slow chill breeze trailed behind him from the basement door as it crept open" (297), setting in motion the final destructive accelerant. Freed from her prison, Willa Nedeed ascends the stairs with her enshrouded son in tow: "the woman crossed the threshold, dragging the lace between her legs" (299). With more instinct than intention, like "the wingless queen who cannot fly from danger, blindly dragging her bloated egg sac," Willa approached her husband. Her arms encircled him and "the three were welded together. Luther tried to wrench free, but they breathed as one, moved as one, and one body lurched against the fireplace. The trailing veil brushed an ember, the material curling and shrinking as orange sparks race up its fine weave" (300). Both stories conflate matrimonial and funeral vestments; it becomes impossible to distinguish a winding sheet that forms a shroud from a bridal veil. Willa uses her veil as a swathe for her dead son; Madeline may never have become a bride, but the overtones of incest between her and her brother suggest a deathly marriage. Tellingly enough, neither tale portrays an actual spirit of the demised; instead, each features nearly dead, ghostly figures that embody horrific legacies. The merging of bodies into one also happens in both texts. When the Nedeed corpses are extracted, "Lester had expected to see three bodies brought out, but one massive bulk was covered and carried to [End Page 110] the ambulance" (303). As in "Usher," the house's implosion follows the death of the last of the Nedeeds. By the time the fire truck left, "The Nedeed home was a pile of charred wood, one side completely gone and the others only represented by high pointed spikes. The water was freezing over them, so that under the moonlight, tiny droplets glistened as they rolled down the three jagged shafts" (303). Liberating Willa and witnessing Nedeed's undoing enables Willie to understand his destiny lies outside of Linden Hills and in following his own path as a poet.

If the landscape of Linden Hills is reminiscent of the inverted ecology of the Bottom that opens Morrison's Sula, Naylor's African American gothic aesthetic is also in conversation with Morrison's identification of the Africanist presence in White-authored American literature. Poe scholars have similarly taken up Morrison's charge that "No early American writer is more important to the concept of American Africanism than Poe" in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination.¹⁶ While her analysis focuses mainly on Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), her dissection of how the immigrant trajectory known as the "American dream" found root in Poe's haunting fiction is particularly relevant to the mental and physical suffering of Linden Hills residents, who manifest Morrison's statement that "the glamor of riches is in thrall to poverty, hunger, and debt."¹⁷ Naylor's novel, through its infernal allegory, turns Morrison's idea of "Romancing the Shadow" on its head. In family photographs, Priscilla (the third Mrs. Nedeed), a woman who once ran for President of the Association of Colored Women, is progressively "lost in [Luther's] shadow" until "her face was gone" (208, 249). The shadow that veils the faces of Priscilla and Laurel Dumont is a persistently corrosive Whiteness, a fog that chokes the vitality, clouds the silver mirrors, and erodes kinship ties leaving only isolation that is, as Morrison writes, "mute, meaningless, unfathomable, pointless, frozen, veiled, curtained, dreaded, senseless, implacable."¹⁸ All these adjectives exemplify the trials faced and endured by Linden Hills residents the closer they get to the bottom of the top or the top of the bottom. Even Nedeed ponders why his applicants never questioned why "there was always space in Linden Hills," failing to notice their predecessors have been "devoured by their own drives" (18).

Before leaving Linden Hills, I want to excavate the penultimate story involving Tupelo Drive resident Laurel Dumont. Another narrative tie with Poe is how Naylor multiplies the short-story genre, producing linked stories with interruptions from the feminist counternarrative spiraling from the basement archive of the Nedeed house. The moral of several of these tales is that hetero-patriarchy kills; it manages to poison couples who live according to different measures, like Ruth and Norman, who are besieged by proximity to the infernal [End Page 111] neighborhood. Dumont's story explores how the two passions of her life are turned against her once she marries and moves into 722 Tupelo Drive, "the twelve-room stone Tudor [that] had belonged to the Dumonts for over sixty years" (231). Laurel tries to make this house her home, installing a diving pool and a music room. But when Nedeed comes to inform her she will have to vacate due to her impending divorce, her hold on sanity snaps. "Dear God, she was going insane," is one of her final thoughts as she realizes the "emptiness" of her home and the truth of Luther's pronouncement that "she had never lived in a house in which she had never lived" (246). Although she bore the Dumont name by marriage, according to the twisted trusts securing Nedeed's empire, only men can occupy property, in a perverse resurrection of eighteenth-century coverture laws that affirmed the nineteenth-century maxim that a woman is a slave from the cradle to the grave.¹⁹ Laurel protests, "We're in the twentieth century," but gothic temporalities do not recognize linear progression (244). The infernal terms of the Tupelo Realty Corporation exist in an alternate universe. As Willa Nedeed will discover in the subsequent chapter, death provides the only liberation. Laurel "sprang" from the diving board into an empty pool believing there was "nothing to fear. Once she got down there she'd be free" (248).

Untreated or unacknowledged depression runs rampant in Linden Hills, but rather than a type of racial melancholia, we might consider Laurel, Willa, and Angela from Due's The Good House as manifesting what Therí Pickens calls "mad blackness."²⁰ Triggered by a loss of self, of failing to see oneself in the "silver mirror God propped up in your soul" (epigraph, np), capitalist accumulation becomes a mental illness. Naylor's focus on heterosexual marriage as a primary means of solidifying property ownership and as fundamentally corrosive is underscored by the fact that the one "happy" couple, Norman and Ruth, live just outside Linden Hills' borders in an home that is empty of every possession but love, due the fact that Norm is afflicted with "the pinks" (35), a hallucinatory condition that makes him unable to maintain employment and causes him to destroy all of their property (35). Rather than abandon him to a tragic fate, Ruth accepts his condition as an alternative to a life in Linden Hills that comes with "the weight of accumulated things: good brocade chairs, linens, a set of company silverplate" (35). Ruth choses to stay because "Love rules in [their] house" (38). It is in Ruth and Norm's house that they hear Willa's "long, thin howl," rising up from Tupelo drive like a "springboard" (42) from the lake in a tragic foreshadowing of Laurel's final dive. With an uncanny perception, it is Ruth who sparks Willie and Lester's quest for employment in the bowels of the inferno.

Lovecraft Country also reprises the idea that spectral, ancestral knowledge can provide a ladder or an escape from a falling house. The featured gothic mansion is a replica built on the ruins of a previous estate known as Ardham [End Page 112] Lodge. The original lodge, which was home to the immortal founder of a mystical order, was consumed during an event known as the "The Great Fire." By the end of the episode, a repeat of events that led to the house's first immolation commences after an attempt to harvest potentially magical blood from the main protagonist goes awry, leading to the implosion of the house. The hero is saved only because he follows the spectral image of his ancestress, who runs through flaming hallways carrying a baby in her arms. This haunting, a vestige of a prior escape, is a talisman that the protagonist will return to throughout the series to uncover past secrets. A full recap of the series' revisionist approach to Lovecraft's canon or American horror fiction is beyond my purview, but the falling house, an image traced back to the fissure in the house of Usher, and the foundational fault line in the United States that sought to build a nation on a foundation of blood and exploitation, is an image/motif that African American writers have also found particularly generative.

African American writers and artists have engaged literary tools and conventions of the gothic to suit their aims of exposing the lingering legacies of slavery and land exploitation, and the fraught position of Black "settlers" as both participants in and resisters to the capitalist drive for maximum profit and extraction. As historian Tiya Miles poignantly observes, for descendants of the enslaved "the line between 'native' and 'settler,' blurs and bleeds."²¹ African Americans migrating post-emancipation or to escape Jim Crow segregation are perpetually caught up in the triad of relations between "settler-native-slave."²² Such histories also undergird the hauntings that occur in Tananarive Due's The Good House, which have their roots in a Black response to White supremacist violence that nevertheless outrages an Indigenous spirit and has disastrous consequences for Marie Toussaint. Survival, as Willie's ancestress reminds us, cannot be achieved at any cost, else it can be a kind of living death, an internal prison, which as Willa learns from unearthing the homespun archive of her predecessors (and taking a cue from Madeline) she can be freed from as soon as she decides to walk up the stairs. In Due's The Good House, Marie's attempts to combat the terror of White supremacy by enlisting the aid of an Indigenous spirit she does not understand wreak havoc on her family and community.

Due's The Good House employs elements of the Southern gothic but transports them from Louisiana to the Pacific Northwest. The novel opens in 1929, on the eve of a portentous event at the home of Marie Touissaint and her Native life partner known to the townsfolk by the pejorative moniker "Red John." The Good House is about intergenerational haunting and communal and spiritual jurisprudence. It works through what it means to suppress ancestral and territorial knowledge. Miles has excavated the fraught and complex kinship ties between African Americans and Native Americans, evident in claims of tribal [End Page 113] affiliation, land removal, and even transracial passing.²³ Although Black settlers do not bear the same kind of debt to Indigenous people as White settlers, the narrative trajectory illustrates that ignorance of Indigenous land traditions can have dire consequences resulting in natural and unnatural disasters within and without the home.

One of the most salient takeaways from The Good House has to do with the passing down of ancestral knowledge about the land. The novel is one of the few fictions that focuses on a Black "pioneer" in the Pacific Northwest. Like the titular house of Usher, the Goode House is named for its proprietor: Elijah Goode. The property sits in the town of "Sacajawea," so called for Lewis and Clark's Native American guide. Marie knows she has arrived in the correct space because she sees a walnut tree from her dreams: "Like me, the tree was a transplant, brought out of its natural environment to make a new home in the West."²⁴ Unfortunately, lack of proper respect for the land and traditions of the Chinook people undermines the relationship that Marie Toussaint forms with "Red John," and the life they hope to build in the house she inherits from Elijah Goode. Called the Good House both after the previous owner and because the land felt "blessed beyond all description" (26), the homestead includes an area known to locals as "The Spot," a clearing Marie refers to as the "Place" or the "crossroads forest" (347). "The Spot" is a Native burial site, "thick with spirits" both benevolent and wild (341). Prompted by acts of racial aggression by White settlers that recall the trauma of her first husband's lynching in Louisiana, Marie calls upon a Chinook spirit previously banished "because it liked […] death" (335). Her vengeful act results in a devastating mudslide that ravages the town and incurs a generational curse. She deeply regrets her transgression and seeks to make reparative gestures, but her failure to share the truth of her powerful legacy and its consequences with her children leads them to repeat her mistakes: "[Marie] had kept her progeny in ignorance, stripping them of her knowledge" (265). Ultimately, when you keep the truth from people to protect them, you make them vulnerable because with hard truths come durable armor. Truth is awareness, a consciousness of connectivity.

That ignorance opens the door to the traumatic events that propel the novel, which involves numerous deaths by gun violence, drowning, and other means both mundane and supernatural. Coping with the trauma of lynching or self-inflected gun violence has psychological ramifications for the Toussaint family line. Their supernatural trials are grounded in the material challenges to Black mental health. Untreated depression, whether the root cause is paranormal or genetic, can have catastrophic results. Marie explains that her transgression is a result of a "half-crazed state" (347). Similarly, Laurel Dumont's suicide in Linden Hills, which is coldly observed and perhaps nudged by [End Page 114] Luther Nedeed, has its roots in how her relentless pursuit of superficial laurels, indicated by her name, comes at the expense of her emotional well-being. As Catherine Ward astutely notes, Laurel is an "Amazon who mutilates her spirit."²⁵ The ethos of the speculative universe of The Good House is in line with Avery Gordon's contention that "haunting is a constituent element of modern social life. It is neither premodern superstition or individual psychosis; it is a generalizable social phenomenon of great import."²⁶ The destructive forces that threaten to implode the Good House as the family attempts to do battle with the relentless spirit also recall the falling house trope initiated by "Usher." Poe's narrator marks the "utter depression of the soul" that pervades Usher's domain (397). Similarly, Angela's friend Myles observes that "[if] a house could feel pain, Angie's grandmother's house was in agony," and he fears the "house might topple," as if from an "earthquake" (386–7). Another salient association with Poe's text is the evidence of intergenerational psychological trauma resulting from fractures or "fissures" created by White supremacist acts of brutality. Like the edifices in both "Usher" and Linden Hills, the Good House hides a secret trauma in its basement that represents the end of a family line, the foreclosure of the house, as it were. Early in the novel, Angela's son shoots himself in the head in the basement while family and friends gather for a Fourth of July party upstairs. Later, we discover his act of courage prevented the spirit from possessing his body. But for much of the novel, Angela actively grieves her son's death. At one point, she places herself in a psychiatric institution.

The idea that African Americans continue to suffer from the collective trauma resulting from racial terrorism is a given in The Good House, but Due is interested in more than revisiting racially motivated trauma; she probes BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) responses to it. In an interview addressing what her novel has in common with haunted house narratives in American culture, Due states:

Often in these kind of novels, where there is a curse on a town or a parcel of land, it's because some horrible act was committed there, for example, a Native American slaughter or the desecration of a burial ground. In The Good House, the curse is borne by people based upon their RESPONSES to wrongdoing. This legacy is the heart of the African experience in America, I would say—we should remember the wrongs committed against us, but it is our own strength of character that will determine our future here.²⁷

By dramatizing the generational impact of Marie's transgression, Due's novel prefigures research by doctors and healthcare professionals that investigates [End Page 115] how intergenerational trauma impacts BIPOC communities in every aspect of their lives, from addiction and eating disorders to diagnoses of diabetes and high blood pressure. Art, a character in the novel who drowns his son while possessed by the Chinook spirit, recounts the history Marie refused to share with Angela: "The land had been stolen by others, and it recognized no owner. The land belonged to spirit, not to flesh. The red men had understood this about the land, and Marie should have known, too" (265). From the perspective of the Chinook spirit, Marie repeats the mistakes of White settlers becoming "insufferable": "She could have offered libations and sacrifice and collected sacred soil in a pouch to wear around her neck, across her breast" (265). Due's imaginative exploration of BIPOC responses to wrongdoing underscores the notion that "haunting aims to wrong the wrongs."²⁸ There is no atonement or moving past; instead, transgressors are compelled to sit with and experience repetition of the harm.

African American fiction has used gothic elements to speculate about reparative possibilities. Despite the horror experienced by the residents of Linden Hills, the unearthing of ancestral knowledge has the power to open new pathways. In Linden Hills, the autobiographical writings of the previous Nedeed wives empower the final wife to liberate herself and end the cycle of patriarchal property speculation. In The Good House, Angela's son recovers his grandmother's memoir/grimoire. Unfortunately, he fails to heed her warning, and the papers are lost to fire. His mother later pieces together what happened from a variety of sources, including oral stories from the townspeople and a taped interview with Marie Toussaint housed at the Sacajawea Historical Society. That knowledge allows her to perform the correct cleansing ritual to heal the rift between land and spirit.

After the cleansing, Angela is graced with a vision of Afro-Native kinship in the afterworld. First, she sees the sacred space restored: "Wooden canoes were strung from all the trees as far as she could see in one direction. Like great ornaments, hundreds of them decorated the woods. All of the canoes were filled with the dead and their belongings. This was a burial ground. The canoes were the last remnants of a people, and their spirits had been here all along, whispering stories as they hung" (457). Native American burial mounds can be found throughout the United States in both rural and urban locations; some are acknowledged with commemorative plaques while others have been reburied beneath sprawling developments and deliberate amnesia. After Angela perceives "The Spot," she sees the forest glade "teeming with people gathered around a bonfire, two hundred or more people standing shoulder to shoulder. […] It was like stepping into Africa, she thought. Not Africa.—Haiti. […] There were a few whites swaying and clapping with everyone else, but most of the people [End Page 116] here were black. And Native American. […] 'Kouzen!' a woman's voice called to her" (459). The diasporic, transnational, interracial jubilee is part of the miracle made possible by Angela's courageous act. Drawing upon the strength of her blood and adopted kinfolk, she creates the circumstances for the time travel back to the critical fork in the road that unleashed the terror.

Black and Indigenous land dispossession has become news in the post-Black Lives Matter era. Tracts of beach front property known as Bruce's Beach in Southern California have recently been restored to the original owners, and a form of reparations has offered relief to Black farmers. In response to these belated amends, the inheritors of Bruce's Beach note the return of property cannot assuage the depression and psychological toll resulting from the initial theft.²⁹

African Americans have had to negotiate what it means to occupy stolen land in a stolen body. Being a successful homeowner or attaining citizenship rights as an American often meant following the US imperialist script of exploitation and erasure. The Good House offers an understanding of collective trauma along with the possibility of renewal and new bonds of kinship. As Marie observes in her taped interview that Angela finds archived in the town historical society, "too much done and too much undone" (283). In the material world, what has been done cannot be undone, but new, better pathways can be formed.

Poe's "Usher" offers no possibility of renewal or rebuilding; it predicts and then fulfills the collapse. The narrator survives only to pass on a warning since the house has vanished into the tarn. In both Naylor and Due, the excavation of her-stories enables more hopeful resolution. The Good House imagines a miraculous repair that undoes the protagonist's and the communities' suffering, whereas in Linden Hills, Willa's liberation sets fire to the Tupelo Realty Corporation. As Willie and Lester note, the community "let it burn" (304), suggesting that the fire this time, to quote James Baldwin, is a cleansing one. Although "Usher" may have cast a long shadow, Linden Hills and The Good House leave us with some potential anodynes that let in the light. "Hand anchored to hand" (304), Willie and Lester scale a fence and leave Tupelo drive, illuminated by a full moon, while Angela watches fireworks with an old flame on the Fourth of July.